Good for Toowoomba (and some autobiographic details)

Toowoomba is a lovely, lively regional town, and it's great to see that it will be a hub for training of this kind:

Qantas has chosen Toowoomba as the location for its first pilot training school, which it says will eventually turn out 250 pilots a year to help address a global shortage of skilled aviators.

The airline said on Thursday that Toowoomba, in Queensland’s Darling Downs, beat a shortlist of other regional towns thanks to its favourable environment and infrastructure, and students and trainers' willingness to live in the area.

The shortage of pilots predicted internationally is huge:

Qantas says an estimated 790,000 extra pilots will be needed globally over the next 20 years - about a third of those in the Asia Pacific - as population growth and burgeoning middle classes see more people take to the sky.

As for why this is of personal interest:   as a kid, I always fancied the idea of being a pilot.   Not coming from a rich family, however, paying a private pilot school was never a possibility.

I was reminded of this a couple of years ago when going through some old personal papers at home, with the kids around.   I found a letter, written to me in (I think) 1974, from QANTAS thanking me for the enquiry, but advising that they did not conduct their own pilot training.   "See!"  I said to my I-don't-have-any-idea-how-I-would-like-to-make-a-living high school age children "at 14 I was writing to a company asking about how I might get to work for them - and they were taking me seriously enough to write back!"   (I like to complain about young people today taking far, far too long to work out what they might like to do work-wise:  I am particularly encouraging my kids to not waste time accumulating HECS debt on courses they start but don't finish.)

A consequence of the QANTAS letter was that I knew the only prospect I had to be a pilot would be via RAAF entry.  But then, around age 15 I think, I realised that my left eye was considerably weaker than my right.   This led to me dropping in one day at the Defence Force Recruiting centre in the city, and asking whether it could be checked so that I would know whether pilot entry was a possibility.  They did, and the answer was "no, sorry". 

Hence, I knew that pilot as a career was not an option, and I started thinking about other things.

As it happens, go forward a few years and I was learning to drive and finding it a much more stressful experience than I expected.  (I really did not like the first driving instructor I had.)  It made me realise, though, that the weaker eye sight in one eye may have been a blessing in disguise - I think I would have found RAAF pilot training a bit too stressful.

As it happens, the path I chose ended up with spending years in the RAAF anyway, with the occasional joy ride in jets (including one in an F-18 - but for which I ended up with no documentary proof.  There is a photo of me about to get into it, but I don't even know where that is at the moment.  My son likes to annoy me by saying that I probably dreamt it all.)

I also tried learning to fly in gliders, but I found landings a bit of a worry, including once landing roughly with the gear still retracted!  (My instructor kicked himself for missing it.)   My Dad took terminally ill in this period anyway, causing me to lose interest and did not go back to it.

But, yeah, perhaps a good thing the pilot career option was abandoned at an early age...:)